Categories

Archives

See Fox get frantic

It’s happening, folks. Across America, TV sets in households with pre-set channels tuned to Fox News are about to get an onslaught of frantic lunacy set to the tune of something reminiscent of a colorful mix between America the Beautiful, James Horner’s Charging Fort Wagner and Carl Orff’s O Fortuna.

As the 24/7 media arm for the Republican party and its Right-wing audience, Fox News’ popularity relies heavily on viewers’ willingness to believe anything; less-than-fact-driven nonsense fueled by the promise that a “return to real American values” is coming in the form of a Republican hopeful dutifully unseating President Barack Obama in 2012.

It happened once before – when a then Senator Obama’s election surprised the nation with its inevitability – and Fox News went into full hysteria-mode to downplay, degrade and demoralize anything and everything coming out of the left, “progressive” machine.

After Obama’s election, they went off the deep end – caving to the deepest, darkest depths of Right wing ignorance, apathy and self-revelation.

“Stars” were born from the likes of Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin. Would-be nobodies were granted autonomy with the likes of Pamela Geller and Michelle Malkin. Comedic yet soulless faux-journalism was given a pulpit with Ann Coulter.

An entire pseudo-political “movement” – reminiscent more of the KKK than of 18th century colonial rebels – hijacked the country’s humble beginnings by calling itself “The Tea Party” while perpetuating widespread racial and religious demonization as well as paranoid conspiracy-mongering under the guise of “patriotism.”

The Right-wing clamored and clawed and subversively gained a stranglehold on its following’s singular consciousness; reveling in as well as validating the country’s basest forms of fanaticism, bigotry and cultural divides.

With victory in sight – in the form of a 2010 midterm election cycle won largely for Republicans, highly-publicized and well-attended Tea Party rallies and skyrocketed network ratings – Fox News seemingly had the 2012 election in the bag. That is, until, the circus-performer gaggle of Republican presidential candidates hit the national scene while the actual President crushed Right wing talking points – one after another – leaving the contenders with little else to argue over other than social memes like prayer in schools, gay soldiers and holiday “wars”.

On the verge of failing its highest-paying client, Fox is now reverting to their full-steam scare tactics of 2009 – when a country enchanted with the incoming Democratic President was left vulnerable via its contact high with “Hope and Change”.

Pulling out all stops, Fox is digging down deeper possibly than ever before – waging “wars” against any and all “symptoms” of an imaginary, liberal agenda.

Convincing avid viewers and listeners that they know best, Fox News pundits are base-lessly calling out otherwise pointless anecdotes to once again fire up its base all the way to the polls at the end of the year.

It is hard to watch literally any program on Fox News without reeling in dumbfounded surprise over their profoundly inane and utterly offensive talking points.

One more recent instance was that of Bill O’Reilly – who has arguably surfaced as the most sane voice on the network – insinuating that the Occupy Wall Street / 99% Movement activists are little more than “drug-trafficking crack heads.”

Bill O

O’Reilly had already referred to the 99% as “violent, America-hating anarchists.” Not to be out-shined by his co-workers, he obviously upped the ante to drive the point home; downplaying what is arguably the largest and most driven, global political movement since the 1960s by classifying it as a “counter-culture collective” of unsanitary drug pushers, thieves and welfare queens.

O’Reilly and his guests of “Culture Warriors” offer no description of the pro-American cause of the actual Occupy movement – as that would simply confuse his viewers – and so instead revels in bashing it based on pointless, nonobjective drivel that reeks of selective, partisan, cultural hate mongering.

Questioning guest Gretchen Carlson of Fox and Friends fame on her views of the Occupy Movement, the fellow Fox News employee cited a poll of protesters from which she conveyed “Most of them are in their twenties and they believe that Canada is how America should become, which says ‘socialism’ to me.”

Really, Gretchen? Canada is socialist now? Did you learn that in school, or did you have to “look it up” again?

Or perhaps are you, O’Reilly and the rest of your ilk attempting to lump anything deemed “foreign” as a threat to our national and international status? Are you actively trying to – in layman’s terms – demonize anything outside the Right wing’s narrow comfort zone as being un-American while pandering to a base that is either too ignorant or too apathetic to even want to know the difference?

Because that is what works, isn’t it? Fox News and its cohorts are revving their engines for the 2012 finish line while lobbing increasingly giant globs of inept social-provocation at every turn. That is their format and it works; the 2010 midterm elections are proof of that.